Matt Webster, a 23-year-old engineering student from Smithfield, Va., was one of four students inside when the gunman appeared. "He was decked out like he was going to war," Webster recalled. "Black vest, extra ammunition clips, everything." Again, his look was blank, just a stare, no expression, as he started shooting. The first shot hit Librescu in the head, killing him. Webster ducked to the floor and tucked himself into a ball. He shut his eyes and listened as the gunman walked to the back of the classroom. Two other students were huddled by the wall. He shot a girl, and she cried out. Now the shooter was three feet away, pointing his gun right at Webster.

"I felt something hit my head, but I was still conscious," Webster recalled. The bullet had grazed his hairline, then ricocheted through his upper right arm. He played dead. "I lay there and let him think he had done his job. I wasn't moving at all, hoping he wouldn't come back." The gunman left the room as suddenly as he had come in.

When Webster opened his eyes, he saw blood everywhere. Some of it was his, though he didn't realize it until he saw blood pouring out the sleeve of his sweat shirt. The girl nearby was unable to speak, only moaning. Blood seeped from her mouth.

Jumping students
At 9:45, the Virginia Tech police received the first 911 call from inside Norris Hall. Then more calls started coming in to police and EMTs throughout the region, with reports of mass casualties. The first officers from the university and city police forces arrived in minutes to find a large crowd of students on the Drillfield, a vast expanse across from Norris. They ordered the students to leave the area, immediately.

Tucker Armstrong, a freshman from Stephens City, Va., had been walking by Norris when he heard the shots and saw several students jumping out the second-floor windows. They were landing in bushes and struggling to get up. He saw the police arrive, fully armed, yelling at everyone to get inside. Matthew Murray, a freshman from Herndon, was watching as he huddled nearby in a second-floor doorway at McBride Hall. "People were running out of Norris and screaming. Streams of people were running out constantly. It was controlled, but you could tell everyone was panicked and very upset." An older man came out grabbing his bloody head. Then the jumpers. At least three people leaping out of second-story windows. One missed the grass and "hit the pavement especially hard. He landed kind of crunched up over toward his face, and he didn't get up at all."

Jamal Albarghouti, a Palestinian graduate student in construction management from the West Bank, was nearby. He had been on his way to talk to an adviser about leadership skills when he heard the noise at Norris and instinctively ran toward it. With his silver Nokia N70 smart phone, he captured flitting video of the scene: shots firing, police scampering, wind blowing, terror. It only hinted at the horrific violence, but for the rest of that day and night, it would serve television as the primary video footage of what happened at Norris.

After storming the building, breaking the locks, the police ran up to the second floor and carefully entered each classroom, one by one. At some point, Cho Seung Hui apparently placed one of his guns at his temple and pulled the trigger. The scene was something these experienced officers had never witnessed. As they entered each room, they asked the students to hold out their hands, show that they had no weapons, and then led those who could walk down the stairs and outside. But there were so many bodies. Blood everywhere, pieces of flesh. The shooter himself, with a gun lying nearby, was almost unrecognizable, a face destroyed. And the innocent victims did not just have bullet wounds, the police would recount later, but were riddled with bullets, gushing blood. The scene was so emotionally overwhelming that many officers could not hold back tears even as they went about their business.

Matthew Lewis, the student EMT president, heard the distress call when he was at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where he had taken the second victim of the West Ambler Johnston shooting. By the time he made it back to campus, a staging area for medical treatment and evacuations had been set up on Stanger Street, a block from Norris Hall. Emergency personnel were treating students with minor injuries, the jumpers and others who had been scuffed during the panic, but not shot. People were trickling out from Norris, but it was no longer chaos.

Treating wounds
The first wave of wounded patients was carried into Montgomery Regional Hospital in Blacksburg shortly after 10 a.m. -- bloodied, mangled, some on the verge of death. Davis B. Stoeckle, a general surgeon, was on call that morning and worked the emergency room from beginning to end with a colleague, Holly Wheeling. They had been told to brace for the extraordinary numbers of victims and levels of trauma that they would face. They established a triage to focus first on the most gravely wounded.

One after another, the students came in.

Gunshot to the leg.

Bullet hole in the stomach.

Gunshot through the liver, part of a kidney and colon.

CONTINUED : Makeshift tourniquet

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